Nothing But My Version of Ordinary

I dreamed about Kenneth last night. I'm not sure what to make of it.

In my dream, I was in a room with two cribs. One was the crib belonging to Grant, and the other one was full of stuffed animals, toys, and the like. I was panicking as I looked into the crib that was full of toys, looking for Kenneth. As I was looking, he stood up in this crib from underneath all of the toys, laughed, and put his arms up to be picked up. In my dream, he was the same age Grant is now, even though he died when he was a month old. I laughed and picked him up, and started looking for ways to take his ventilator and his ECMO pump with him so that I could take him out of the room with me. I told someone else in the dream that I could take the ventilator with me, but not the pump, and then I woke up.

Any wannabe dream interpreters out there want to take a crack at that one?

I sure miss that boy. Holidays seem to make his absence sharper.

Grief doesn't have a time limit. This is a lesson I've learned the hard way as time has gone on. I've been fortunate in life to have not lost anyone close to me before Kenneth died, so his death and my subsequent grief journey is the only experience I have with loss. I've heard that the loss of a child is different, somehow, to other kinds of loss. I wouldn't know. I suppose one day, I'll face the loss of others that are dear to me, and then I'll have a means of knowing. Until then, I have this.

There are a thousand little ways that losing a child still hurts, even several years later. It's the small stab of pain when a stranger, smiling, asks you "How many children do you have?". It's the guilt you feel when you consider saying "One" when the answer is really "Two", just so that you don't have to see the pity in the stranger's eyes or explain that your other child is dead. It's the feeling of incompleteness in your home that will never really go away, because one is and will always be missing. It's feeling joy at watching your living child meet his milestones, while simultaneously feeling grief that you never got to see that same milestone with your lost child. It's going on with life with a measure of happiness, all the while feeling a little guilty because when your child died, you were sure your capacity for happiness died too, and to experience it again feels like a betrayal. It's feeling guilt for thinking of your dead child while playing with your living one.

Since we lost Kenneth, blogging has become my means of coping with his death. I can wrestle with the thoughts that plague me, get them out in writing so that I can organize them and make sense of them. I'd thought that I should change the direction of my blogs, but the reality is that Kenneth's life and death are such a huge part of me now. I cannot make him the focus of my "real life", because I have a living child who needs me and who should not have to live in his brother's shadow. Blogging about Kenneth and my grief allows me to keep it in it's proper place, out of my head and away from Grant for the time being.

This blog will continue to talk about Kenneth, and grief, and death, and life. They're all one big tangle in my head, maybe because they're all interconnected. Kenneth changed me permanently, and it would be wrong for me to pretend that my life is the same as it was before. Time has healed me of the anguish that went with his loss, but not the chronic pain that comes with knowing that he will always be gone. Time can't take away the well-meaning strangers, the little stabs of pain, the unreasonable feelings of guilt. They're a part of the new life that I have, a part of my new normal.

I'm a blog slacker now. I used to write all the time, and now it feels like I have nothing to say. My days go something like this...

Wake up.
Eat and get ready.
Go to work.
Pick up Grant.
Spend an hour or two with Grant before he goes to bed.
Play around on the computer/watch tv
Go to bed.
Repeat.

I do have my share of angst and all of that good stuff, but I feel like I've already said all I can say about the bad stuf. I'm wanting to post about good things, but the good things seem to be hard to write about without coming across as trite. We have drama with the house, but I think at this point it's out of our hands. We'll hire the lawyer, bleed money to pay for the experts, and it will eventually get settled... or at least that's what we hope.

Life seems to vacillate between the mundane and major drama. I don't know if everyone's life is like mine, with all of the bizarre bad things that seem to happen, but it really doesn't matter in the long run. You take the hand you're dealt and do the best with it that you can. Whining isn't going to solve anything, even if it does make me feel better for a few minutes.

So. Good things. Grant has taken his first step. He'll be a year old in a week. I have a great husband, an adorable little boy, and a house that has a perfect floorplan, even if the foundation is crap. LOL. I do miss hanging out with friends, but if that's the price to pay for having kids, I'd pay it over and over again. Life is what it is, and it's time I stopped bitching about it and start making the best of it.

I read a book cover-to-cover yesterday. It's called "The Lovely Bones", and plot follows a girl who has been murdered at age 14. She's in her heaven, watching her loved ones and her murder.

The book brought up thoughts I've had off and on since Kenneth died, thoughts I'm sure that all of us have had from time to time. What really happens when we die? I know what the Bible has to say about it, so I don't really want to look at it from that angle right now. I want to think outside the box.

I've never had what you'd call a "paranormal" experience. Some people talk about having their deceased loved ones visit them in their dreams. I haven't had that, either. I didn't really care about the paranormal stuff one way or the other before Kenneth died, but I now have a morbid curiosity.

I don't want to go to some con artist and throw money away for the chance to 'talk' to Kenneth, but I do have this burning desire to know if he's really okay.

I guess some questions will always be unanswered.

Things have been so stressful around here lately. The whole house issue is part of it (okay, a big part of it), but we've also had a sick baby all week and an announcement from my school district that they'll be doing a Reduction in Force, aka "RIF". That's layoffs, in normal people terminology.

The district isn't being very clear on who, exactly, will be subject to the RIF. Ordinary jobs would let people go based on seniority, but not NEISD. Seniority is last in the list of four criteria to be RIFed. At the moment I can't remember what the other three are, but I'll look it up again later. From what I understand, they'll look at each specialty (EC-4 generalists, music teachers, science teachers... you get the idea) and decide how many positions need to be cut. They'll then look and see how many people from within those specialties will be retiring or not returning to the district in the fall. If that takes care of the need to reduce staff, then nobody from within that specialty will be let go. If it doesn't, then a number of people will be on the list to be RIFed. They'll then look at those people's certificates to see what areas they're certified to teach. If they can move a teacher to a different subject area within the district, then they'll do that without letting them go. If not, they get canned.

I *think* I'm fairly secure in my job, just because they'll be opening 2 new schools in the fall. I've been with the district for 6 years now (7 at the end of this school year....how is that possible??), so I have some seniority. What I don't have are extra credentials on my certificate. I'm torn about that. Do I add to my certificate, knowing that could mean that I'd have a job, but I'd be teaching something I don't necessarily want to teach? Or, do I just leave it alone, stay a music teacher, and risk the RIF? For that matter, I could be RIFed regardless of what other credentials I add. I hesitate to add to my certificate because I know I'd be miserable teaching a TAKS subject or being a classroom teacher with the same 20 faces all day long. I hate the beauracracy and paperwork part of this profession, and being a music teacher allows me to avoid a good part of it. Being in a classroom would mean that all of the things I hate about the teaching profession would be magnified.

There's another option that may or may not end up panning out. Hector (the PE teacher I work with) and I have been kicking around the idea of doing some consulting and teambuilding. People in that industry get paid quite well. What gave us the idea was a consultant that came out and did a full day workshop for our school and one other school back in August. The activities that he did were all the types of activities that Hector and I do with the kids all the time. A lot of them were Orff-Schulwerk based, which I have training in. A lot of them were standard teambuilding techniques, which Hector has a background in. That consultant was paid over $2,000 for a day's work, plus expenses. There's no way we'd make that much to start; that consultant has a reputation and therefore can charge a fortune. Hector's pretty confident that we could pull in $500 each for a full day, though. If we could get off the ground, there's a huge market for people that do that sort of work within the education world and also within the corporate world. We're thinking we'll start it off as a side gig for the time being and see where it goes. It would be really nice to be able to set my own schedule to a degree, and maybe be able to earn a living on my own terms without having to work under somebody else. I'm sure there would be things about a job like that that I'd dislike, just like with any other job, but my fantasy is that doing something like that would allow me more time with my family.

To move away from job stress, I mentioned earlier that Grant's been sick all week. Last Saturday, he was running a fever of nearly 103, so we took him to the ER. It shook me up pretty badly even though Grant was okay and just has a virus. The sound of monitors alarming set off a PTSD trigger for me and I had to really work to stay calm and focused on Grant. Having to hold him still so they could poke him not once, but three times, to draw blood didn't help matters any. I was really wanting to be able to go to the support group for parents of kids that have died of a heart defect so that I could talk about it to people who get that, but Grant was still sick and I didn't have anyone to watch him, so I had to stay home. I'm better now, but it really messed with me for a few days. The nurse thought I was one of "those" moms until we explained why the sound of monitors alarming bothered us. We took him home after all of that, got him into bed, and I drank a big glass of wine to calm down. Not fun at all.

Combined with all of this is the issue of our house. To fix our house's foundation, the engineer said that they'd have to drill holes every 7-8' on our slab and drop piers to a depth of 25'. It's a major, expensive repair. Regardless of whether the builder decides to buy us out of the house or fix the house, it will mean we have to move out of here for at least a little while. I'm hoping they can fix the house and just compensate us for the reduction in value that we'd see from having this done. We love this house. It's perfect for us. If it's structurally sound, I can see us living here for a long, long time. BUT... the repairs will be at least a third to a half of the value of the home, assuming they can fix it correctly the first time. I wonder if it's possible to fix this house correctly at all. From the looks of things, Lennar will probably try to say that the foundation isn't really as FUBAR as the engineer said it was. That will mean taking them to court and a big pain in the ass.

All in all, the whole house situation is a big mess. If the builder doesn't do the right thing, we'll have the hassle of having to fight to make them do the right thing. If by some miracle they do the right thing, we'll have to move out of this house and into a hotel while repairs are made, or move out of this house into a rental while we search for a different house to buy. I hate moving with a passion. Moving over 20 times in the course of a 28 year life will do that to a person.

As my brother-in-law said to my husband: "If you didn't have bad luck, you'd have no luck at all". I'm sure feeling that way right about now.

So. My new house is a lemon. It has major foundation issues. Major. It has a 4" difference from one front corner to the opposite back corner. For it to be in code, it wouldn't be able to have more than 1" of difference. It was within code when it was completed in June, which means that there's been 3 inches of foundation movement in a very short period of time. We're seeing lots of symptoms of foundation movement in the house, but I don't feel like listing them all here. The structural engineer that we hired said that he'll recomend a total foundation repair, which he estimates will cost between $50-100K.

We'd work with Lennar's warranty department, but there are other houses in the neighborhood with the same sorts of problems, and Lennar is trying to get away with not fixing the issues. Sooo...we're hiring a lawyer and will take them to court if they don't do the right thing. The "right thing" as far as we're concerned is to either buy the house back (which would make me sad, I love this house) or fix the foundation correctly. If they choose either option, we also want them to reimburse us for our expenses, including the lawyer's fees. If they choose not to play ball, we'll take them to court. Going to court will be a long, drawn-out hassle, so I hope that they agree to just fix the problem. I won't hold my breath, though. If Lennar chooses to be ugly about it, the gloves will come off, and they'll find out that I don't scare easily. Anybody want to help me man a lemonade stand in front of the sales office?

My firstborn child,

There are days that I still miss you so much. I wish that I could reach up to Heaven and hold you, or talk to you and see what your personality is like. You have a brother now. It's strange to think that he's your little brother, yet he's already 10 times older than you will ever be. I wish that there was a way to bring you back to us, healthy and whole, so that our family would be whole again. There's always someone missing, always a hole where you should be.

Sometimes I look at Brian and Keith and I just can't believe that you'd be doing all the things that they're doing now. You'd be running around, getting into things, maybe even talking back and giving me lip. You'd be well into the stubborn terrible two's. Would you like trains and cars? Would you be obsessed with your favorite color and fight your naps? I like to think that you'd be a good big brother, trying to help Grant learn new things and being protective of him even when he's driving you crazy. I like to think that you'd like to crawl into my lap and give me slobbery toddler kisses and bear hugs and let me sing you sleep.

I know that your life wouldn't have been easy if you'd stayed. You would have needed at least two more major heart surgeries, and really you probably would have needed a transplant. When I look at the pictures of you from right before you left us, you looked so tired and like you were in such pain. I know that you don't hurt where you are, but oh your daddy and I hurt. Is it selfish of us to wish that you'd lived, even though your life would have been full of hardships and physical pain? I guess I'm selfish, because it still feels so wrong to have you gone.

Other moms talk about their angel children visiting them in their sleep, but I don't think I've ever had a real visit from you. I don't know if that's because I just don't remember the dreams or if you can't come to see me, but I get so jealous of those other mom's dream visits. I'd be able to see you and hold you again, even if it was just in my dreams. If it's okay, could you come to see me, just once? I've even thought about paying a shyster medium, just for the glimmer of a chance that I could talk to you again. Then again, you were so little when you died, well before the age you could have spoken- would you be able to talk to me? I just want to know that you're okay, that death isn't the end. I want to believe in heaven and that I'll see you again, but it's so very hard when I can't know for sure.

Sweet boy, I don't cry for you every day anymore, but not a day goes by that I don't think about you and what might have been. I love you, your daddy loves you, and your brother will know about you. Your absence from our lives is felt daily, and believe me when I say that just because I don't cry every day doesn't mean I don't miss you on a visceral level every time I take a breath.

We see dragonflies all the time here at our new house. I like to think that you send them to us. I hope that's not just wishful thinking.

I love you, little man.